redeemed bodies

Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism

JONATHAN R. BAER

Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The "full gospel" it proclaimed promised renewed health along with saved souls, and its embryonic ethos prized the human embodiment of divine initiative. Glossolalia and other ecstatic manifestations au-thenticated God's presence and power, reflecting the reality of the Holy Spirit within believers. But the materiality of the culture that gave rise to Pentecostalism received its fullest expression in "divine healing."1 Suffering men and women yearned for the restoration of their broken bodies, and their faith provided it.

Historians have traced the origins of Pentecostalism to the late-nineteenth-century radicalization of the holiness movement that first arose within American Methodism at mid-century and later spread to large segments of evangelical Protestantism.2 Through the ministries

I wish to thank the former Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale Universitynow the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale, still funded by the Pew Charitable Trustsfor invaluable fellowship support. Thanks also to the following for helpful critical readings of earlier drafts: Harry S. Stout, Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, William Inboden, John Stauffer, Corey Beals, Chris Armstrong, D. William Faupel, William Kostlevy, Richard Baer, Joan Baer, and two anonymous readers.

1. Participants in the holiness and Pentecostal movements generally used the term "divine healing/' while other contemporaries also used "faith healing" and "faith cure." I use the term here and throughout without any intent to convey an evaluative judgment. Likewise, I employ throughout the term "healers" without evaluative intent to describe those who taught and practiced divine healing, though they themselves rejected it because they believed healing power came solely from God. Finally, I refer to healings from the perspective of participants, removing the awkward necessity of using qualifications like "alleged" or "claimed."

2. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 1-83; Robert Mapes Ander-son, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1979), 28-61; D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 44-186; Edith Lydia Waldvogel, "The 'Overcoming Life': A Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1977).

Jonathan R. Baer is a doctoral candidate in American religious history in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University.

2001, The American Society of Church History Church History 70:4 (December 2001)

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of figures like Charles Cullis, A. B. Simpson, and Martin Wells Knapp, divine healing became a common feature of the radical wing of the holiness movement by century's end.3 Yet historians of early Pente-costalism have given only limited attention to divine healing, gener-ally placing it in the larger context of the revival of signs and wonders that accompanied radical holiness and early Pentecostal restora-tionism and premillennialism. Instead, they have examined more fully the emergence of the distinctive Pentecostal teaching, the bap-tism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. As one recent scholar has remarked, this shows a degree of historical amne-sia, for healing was at least as prominent a part of early Pentecostal-ism as glossolalia.4 By overlooking the multiple roles of healing in the ministries of those who bridged the two movements, historians ob-scure one of the central lines of continuity between radical holiness expressions and arly Pentecostalism.

This essay examines three divine healers critical to the emergence of Pentecostalism in the United States: Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, John Alexander Dowie, and Charles F. Parham. After surveying their re-spective careers, it analyzes the functions of divine healing in their ministries over the two decades following the mid-1880s. It employs the term "incipient Pentecostalism7' as shorthand for the general religious milieu of the radical holiness movement and early Pentecos-talism. Like almost all incipient Pentecostals, Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham adopted the more absolute articulations of the teaching. They insisted that Christ secured full bodily healing through his atoning sacrifice on the cross and that embracing this form of healing entailed rejecting doctors and medicine. These claims rested upon holiness understandings of sanctification as either the immedi-ate removal or the suppression of personal sin through a second crisis

3. Paul G. Chappell, "The Divine Healing Movement in America" (Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1983); Dayton, Theological Roots, 115-41; Raymond J. Cunningham, "From Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America, 1872-1892," Church History 43 (Dec. 1974): 499-513; Grant Wacker, "The Pentecostal Tradition," in Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 516-20; Gary B. Ferngren, "The Evangelical-Fundamentalist Tradition," in Caring and Curing, 490-95; and Harold Y. Vanderpool, "The Wesleyan-Methodist Tradition," in Caring and Curing, 336-39.

4. See Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition," 520-21, for the "loss of historical memory" involved in downplaying healing. Wacker's essay is the most thorough treatment of early Pentecostal healing. Others include: Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 19-24; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 26-28, 65-67; Anderson, Vision, 93-97; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 130-33; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 192-93.

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 737

experience following conversion, caused by the direct action of the Holy Spirit. Divine healing represented an extension of this holiness perfectionism from the spirit to the body. Just as faith alone could produce sanctification, so too only faith could lead to the renewal of the body.5

Divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism was one of many Chris-tian healing practices that flourished around the turn of the century. Catholic healing shrines at Lourdes in France, St. Anne de Beaupr in Quebec, and Knock Chapel in Ireland drew millions of pilgrims in search of cures and much American publicity. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science and the various groups in the New Thought move-ment taught healing through mental therapeutics and metaphysical monism. Across the Protestant spectrum, the Reformation doctrine of the post-apostolic cessation of miracles weakened perceptibly, as theologians and healers discovered more permeability in the barrier between nature and supernature. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Emmanuel movement arose within Episcopalianism and spread to other mainline Protestant churches, combining theological modernism and psychotherapy to promote healing. Amid the disori-enting social and cultural changes wrought by advanced industrial-ization, urbanization, waves of immigration, and scientific develop-ments, many Christians searched for therapeutic resources within their faith communities or developed innovative spiritual healing programs to address their ailments.6

5. On holiness perfectionism, see Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1996); and Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: The holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867-1936 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974). Cunningham, "From Holiness to Healing," stresses the connections between holiness sanctification and divine healing. Wesleyan holiness advocates of the nineteenth century taught that "entire sanctification" immediately removed inbred sin and perfected the believer's motives and volitional acts. The Higher Life or Keswick form of holiness that spread among traditionally Reformed and non-Wesleyan denominations after 1875 moderated this perfectionism by regarding sanctification as a distinct crisis experience that began a process involving the sup-pression or counteraction of personal sin rather than its eradication. While this theo-logical distinction is important, the practical expectation for believers on both sides was a dramatic cleansing experience that produced "heart purity" and empowerment. On the Higher Life movement, see Waldvogel, "The Overcoming Life'"; and David Bundy, "Keswick and the Experience of Evangelical Piety," in Modern Christian Reviv-als, eds. Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 118-44.

6. Several of the essays in Caring and Curing provide information on turn-of-the-century Christian healing practices. For newspaper reports on Catholic healings from the early 1880s, for example, see the following articles in the New York Times: "The Knock Mortar Miracle," 20 July 1880, 2; "The Lourdes Miracles Again," 13 Jan. 1881, 4; and "Visited by the Virgin Mary," 1 Aug. 1881, 5. For Christian Science and New Thought, see Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998); Beryl Satter, Each Mind a

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All this occurred in the context of a crowded and complex medical marketplace. While orthodox or "regular" doctors sought to profes-sionalize under the banner of science and delegitimize their compet-itors, panaceas of all kinds clamored for the attention of patients. Not surprisingly, medical advances like germ theory fueled claims and expectations that often exceeded the capacities of regular physicians. Doctors remained ill-equipped to address many frightening and fatal diseases like tuberculosis, as well as chronic illnesses that involved psychosomatic elements. "Neurasthenia" or "nervous prostration," which doctors suggested resulted from lack of nerve force, became a common turn-of-the-century diagnosis for harried urbanits ex-hausted by the pace and demands of modern life.7 "Alternative" therapies like homeopathy, chiropractic medicine, the water cure, and dozens more found adherents among those disillusioned by regular medicine or critical of its solidifying scientific paradigm. A burgeon-ing market for patent medicines and nostrumscompletely unregu-lated until the Food and Drug Act of 1906produced thousands of tonics, pills, and medical devices backed by fantastical claims and glowing testimonials. The proprietor of "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegeta-ble Compound" was perhaps the most recognizable woman in Amer-ica in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, owing to the popu-larity of her product and the dominance of nostrum manufacturers in advertising. Pinkham's alcohol-based tonic promised to cure all man-ner of infirmities, especially for women, and her motherly visage adorned her advertisements and labels. Suggesting that male doctors were insensitive to women's health, she invited customer inquiries about delicate female maladies, promising confidentiality and indi-

Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, D. C: Counterpoint, 1999), 137-55. On debates over cessationism, see Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). For the Emmanuel Movement, see Allison Stokes, Ministry after Freud (New York: Pilgrim, 1985), 17-36; and Sanford Gif ford, The Emmanuel Movement (Boston, 1904-1929): The Origins of Group Therapy and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy (Boston: Francis Countway Library of Medicine, 1996).

7. For the professionalization of medicine and its limitations, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic, 1982), 79-144,180-97; and John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 167-228. Concerning neurasthenia, see Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992), 201-32; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 104-29. The neurologist George M. Beard coined the term "neurasthenia" in 1869; see his American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881).


vidual responses. Some two decades after her tombstone settled, Lydia Pinkham's personal signature graced thousands of letters each year offering health tipsmainly increased consumption of her Veg-etable Compoundto suffering women around the country.8

In this religious and medical environment, incipient Pentecostals formed part of a radical evangelical culture featuring divine healing as a central element of a larger program that usually included ecstatic religiosity, strong millennial expectations of Christ's return, a primi-tivist desire to replicate the early church, perfectionist spirituality, and behavioral asceticism. Within this fabric of beliefs and practices, what were the functions of divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism, in addition to relieving sickness? The teachings of incipient Pentecostals on the restoration of the apostolic church and the imminent second coming of Christ helped foster an environment in which healing thrived, but they offer limited insight into the nature and multiple purposes of divine healing. Interpretations based on them treat a profoundly experiential reality too fully in terms of its supporting theological framework. At its most basic level, divine healing pro-vided believers with tangible assurance of the present power and love of God and the human capacity for wholeness in the face of pain, illness, and death. The healed bodies of former sufferers symbolized both their fresh understanding of God's relationship to sickness and the new life world they had entered. For the healers themselves, healing legitimated and demarcated their larger ministries and en-hanced their personal power.

I. THE ECSTATIC HEALING REVIVALISM OF MARIA WOODWORTH-ETTER

Woodworth-Etter (1844-1924), Dowie (1847-1907), and Parham (1873-1929) knew the pain and grief of protracted illnesses and the loss of family members and friends. As they each endured many such situations, they faced the necessity of making sense out of their experiences in light of their Christian beliefs. All of them adopted divine healing amidst deep personal suffering, as they struggled to

8. For nineteenth-century alternative medicine, see Robert C. Fuller, Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On nostrums and patent medicines, see James Harvey Young, American Health Quackery: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 23-31,59-62,89-102; Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); and Stewart H. Holbrook, The Golden Age of Quackery (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 58-66. Edward Bok, muckraking editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, exposed the Pinkham scandal by publishing a photograph of her tombstone, showing that she died in 1883. "Pictures that Tell Their Own Stories," Ladies' Home Journal Sept. 1905, 15.

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understand how God could will the death of a child or a disabling disease. Like the patients they healed in their ministries, they also knew firsthand the limitations of medicine; each one had seen doctors repeatedly fail to bring about healing. Throughout their respective ministries, they referred frequently to their own healing experiences, which served as archetypes for their followers.

Suffering and death marked the life of Maria Woodworth-Etter prior to her turn to public ministry in the early 1880s. Born in New Lisbon, Ohio, in July 1844, Maria Beulah Underwood was almost twelve years old when her father, "addicted to the accursed cup," died suddenly of sunstroke in 1856, leaving her mother to care for eight children with no source of income. Along with her older sisters, Maria had to leave school and work as a domestic away from home. Despite limited religious influence from her parents, Maria converted at the age of thirteen through a Disciples of Christ meeting. She soon sensed a call to evangelism, but since "the Disciples did not believe that women had any right to work for Jesus," she resolved to marry an earnest Christian with whom she could engage in missionary labors. Several years later she entered an unhappy marriage with P. H. Woodworth, a Civil War veteran who had sustained a head injury during military service that limited his capacities. Together they scratched out a living farming near New Lisbon, while Maria's health deteriorated. Over the next fifteen years or so she bore six children, only to see death claim five of them in infancy or early youth. Throughout these ordeals her "nervous system became prostrated," and several times she seemed close to death.9

Whereas many other bereaved mothers of her era turned to spiritualism to salve their heartbreak, Woodworth-Etter found- solace

9. Maria Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years (1916; reprint, Bartlesville, Okla.: Oak Tree Publications, n.d.), 20, 21, 20-27; Maria B. Woodworth, Life and Experiences of Maria B. /oodzvorth (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1885), 28. Signs and Wonders, 19, states she was born in July 1844 and her father died in July 1855, while Life and Experiences, 15, indicates she was born in July 1845 and her father died in 1856. Wayne E. Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1986), 3, suggests July 1844 and July 1856, which I have followed. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to Woodworth-Etter as such hereafter. In 1891, she and P. H. Woodworth divorced, and she remarried in 1902 to Samuel Etter. Secondary literature on Woodworth-Etter is limited. Along with Warner's biography, see Wayne E. Warner, "Maria Beulah Woodworth-Etter/' Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 900-901; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 241-47; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 273-79; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 24; Anderson, Vision, 34-35, 36; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 191.1 am grateful to Wayne Warner for making available to me his personal files on Woodworth-Etter.


through her evangelistic and healing ministry. She later interpreted her hardships as trials God used to deepen her faith and prepare her for ministry. During this time of preparation she experienced several dramatic visions that improved her health and impelled her to evan-gelistic labors, but timidity and the opposition of her husband and daughter caused her to hesitate. Eventually she prevailed and began preaching locally around 1880, shortly after losing her last remaining child to death.

By 1883 Woodworth-Etter had convinced her husband to accom-pany her as she itinerated; while she preached, he sold books and pamphlets, food, and pictures of her to help support the work.11 As thousands flocked to her revivals in the upper Midwest, national press coverage followed by early 1885. Woodworth-Etter began her healing ministry that spring after receiving the gifts of healing (de-scribed in 1 Cor. 12:9) during a revival in Columbia City, Indiana. In her typical fashion, she gave no indication of human influences, saying simply, "The Lord showed me . . . that I had the gift of healing, and of laying on of hands for the recovery of the sick/' Thereafter, her fame rested on her capacity to induce both healings and trances in revival participants, with healing becoming increasingly central to her ministry.12 Though Woodworth-Etter ministered under the auspices of the United Brethren Church (18807-84), the Church of God (Wine-brennerian) (1884-1904), and the Pentecostal movement (19127-24), she operated as an independent evangelist. In 1918 she settled in

10. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989). For Woodworth-Etter's visions and interpretation of her hardships, see Signs and Wonders, 26-30.

11. Woodworth, Life and Experiences, 31-33; Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 26-34; Warner, Woman Evangelist, 15-18. observers, including some supporters of Woodworth-Etter's ministry, criticized "her avaricious husband and his money making adjuncts/' "Woodworth Meeting," Kokomo Gazette Tribune (Indiana), 18 May 1886, 5.

12. For examples of press coverage, see "Religious Craze in Indiana," New York Times, 30 Jan. 1885,1; "Trance Evangelism," Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 Jan. 1885; "Rigid Religion," Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 Jan. 1885, 1; "A Farcical Religion," Indianapolis Times, 11 May 1885,1. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 70-71; 70; M. B. Woodworth, Trials and Triumphs of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1886), 192; Warner, Woman Evangelist, 68 n. 6; Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 241-47. During the 1880s and early 1890s, Woodworth-Etter's ability to induce trances in revival-goers caused great wonder and agitation. Entranced participants would lay cold and rigid, with significantly reduced pulses, for hours on end; upon coming to, they often would describe glorious visions of heaven and reassuring contact with departed loved ones. Woodworth-Etter herself frequently went into trances. See, for instance, Trials and Triumphs, 187. For an example of the controversy caused by trances, see "Ring the Riot Alarm!" and "Flora Briggs' Story," San Francisco Examiner, 9 Jan. 1890,1.

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Indianapolis, building an eponymous tabernacle, which she ran until her death in 1924.13

By all accounts, Woodworth-Etter's revivals were unmatched spec-tacles that anticipated the drama and flavor of early Pentecostalism. Throughout her ministry, she stressed the immanence of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, and various ecstatic behaviors accom-panied the conversions, sanctifications, and healings at her revivals. Carrie Judd Montgomery, a holiness divine healer in Buffalo and then Oakland, said of Woodworth-Etter's 1889-90 Oakland revival: "It was a revelation to me to see the immense crowds that poured into these meetings. I have never before or since attended any gatherings where there was such conviction upon the people The noise of penitential prayer went forth like the sound of a wailing sea . . . . Mrs. Woodworth was wonderfully anointed when she preached. The power of God rested upon many of the people in a remarkable way and there were unusual manifestations of the Lord's presence in the midst/' News-papers called her the "voodoo priestess," the "trance evangelist," and the "priestess of the doctrine of 'divine healing.'"14 A strong majority of reporters and editors were skeptical or antagonistic, some charging her with propagating "bare-faced lies," but others considered her revivals beneficial to the religious life of their communities.15

Most of Woodworth-Etter's healings occurred in revival settings, generally outdoors under large tents or in open fields or parks, with

13. Woodworth-Etter remained silent as to the reasons for two long periods of diminished public activitybetween about 1894 and 1902, and between 1904 and 1912that interrupted her ministry. Like many itinerant eyangelists, she suffered from the grueling demands of her work, often preaching three times daily for weeks on end. Hence, it is possible that health problems forced her to slow down. A more likely explanation for the second period would be Samuel Etter's ongoing invalidism, which was the subject of criticism from reporters. See Warner, Woman Evangelist, 157,183 n. 3. Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experiences, Including Sermons and Visions of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter (n.p., 1904), iii, indicates that she and Etter were building a home for Christian work about 100 miles east of St. Louis, in Cisna, Illinois, at the time of publication. Perhaps they maintained a settled ministry there for several years, ac-counting for the second gap in the record.

14. For examples of ecstatic behaviors in Woodworth-Etter revivals, see August Feick, comp., Life and Testimony of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Evangelist: Finished Biography: Nearly Fifty Years of Ministry (Indianapolis, Ind.: n.p., 1925), 23-24; and Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim. Carrie Judd Montgomery, "Under His Wings'': The Story of My Life (Oakland, Calif.: Office of Triumphs of Faith, 1936), 130. "The Voodoo Priestess/' Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 2 Dec. 1889; "The Trance Evangelist," Indi-anapolis Journal, 26 Sept. 1885, 8; "The Trance Evangelist," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Feb. 1890; Muscatine Journal (Iowa), 7 Aug. 1894.

15. "A Case That Passes for a Faith Cure Reported from Madison County," Indianapolis Journal, 9 Sept. 1885, 2; "A Farcical Religion," 1; "A Cheerful Liar," The Champaign County Herald (Illinois), 7 Sept. 1887,1; "Let There Be Faith," Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 7 July 1888.


anywhere from several hundred to twenty thousand or more people in attendance. Typically she preached in or near small to mid-sized cities, with each engagement lasting from several weeks to months.16

She was a gripping orator whose charisma held the masses spell-bound; her critics claimed she practiced hypnotism, mesmerism, or catalepsy, and attributed her cures to these devices.17 Though her style tended to appeal to the working class, many reports indicate that all types attended her meetings. The San Francisco Examiner described the scene at Woodworth-Etter's Oakland revival in January 1890:

The usual motley throng of converts, idlers, church people, roughs, children, sailors and artisans, athletes and invalids, assembled at Mrs. Woodworth's big tent this afternoon Wan mothers, with nursing babies in their arms, troop in by the dozens Invalids with sunken eyes, narrow-chested consumptives and men with all sorts of hurts and bruises are there to pass an afternoon, work being beyond their power. Slouchy, unkempt matrons and slatternly crea-tures of the street sit side by side with dainty damosels in sealskins and fetching flat turbans Hoodlums are there in bell-bottomed trousers, and solid men of business drop in on the way from the train to their homes . . . all sorts, kinds and conditions of people ready to shout or sing, or pray; given to rigid conditions of the body and mental ecstasy; making strange motions with their hands and utter-ing strange cries, all are under the spell of the pleasant-faced woman who walks her platform smiling and self-possessed.18

In such settings Woodworth-Etter preached the radical holiness gospel of salvation and entire sanctification, but her healings lifted the meetings to a fever pitch. She taught that Satan or his demons caused all disease and infirmity, with individual sin often the proximate cause. Spiritual salvation and physical healing stood as parallel ben-efits of the cross, available to all believers who would surrender by

16. Woodworth-Etter's largest recorded meeting was held thirteen miles northwest of Muncie, Indiana, near the town of Alexandria, in Madison County, in September 1885. "Repentance Run Mad," Indianapolis Times, 22 Sept. 1885,1, reported twenty thousand people in attendance, while Warner, Woman Evangelist, 51, cites estimates of between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand. Though Woodworth-Etter tended to preach in smaller cities, she held revivals in Memphis and Cleveland (1885), India-napolis (1886), Louisville (1888), Oakland (1889-90), St. Louis (1890), and Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles between 1912 and 1918. Her huge success at F. F. Bosworth's Dallas church in 1912 marked her entry onto the Pentecostal stage. Bos-worth became a nationally-known healing evangelist in the 1920s.

17. Charles W. Wendte, "A Timely Call," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 30 Nov. 1889; "Religious Craze in Indiana," 1; "Cataleptic Capers," Indianapolis Sentinel, 15 Dec. 1886.

18. "Under the Woman's Spell," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890. Woodworth-Etter did not explicitly advocate a blurring of social and class lines, though she believed that in the power of the Spirit such distinctions disappeared.

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faith to the power of the Holy Spirit.19 Over the course of her career she claimed to be the instrument of healing for almost every known disease. Asked once by a reporter if she ever failed to heal the sick, Woodworth-Etter replied, "Never. I can not fail while God is with me. Personally, I could accomplish nothing, but to him all things are possible; therefore, when I put my hands upon a sufferer and tell him or her to rise, I know that if the sufferer has faith in Christ he will be cured/'20 Woodworth-Etter believed that healings, as part of the broader category of signs and wonders, had been available to the church throughout its existence, and that its failure to claim these benefits of faith demonstrated its long apostasy. The restoration to the faithful of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, with full apostolic authority and accompanying signs and wonders, revealed that the end times loomed.21 Signs and wonders demonstrated God's love to believers and his awesome, terrible power to non-Christians, providing a fore-taste of heaven and warnings of hell. Through Woodworth-Etter and others, God was reconstituting a faithful remnant to carry full salva-tion for soul and body to the lost multitudes.22

19. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons (Indianapolis: n.p., 1921), 43,42-54,77-82; Woodworth, Life and Experience, 214-18,239-47; Woodworth-Etter, Holy Ghost Sermons (Indianapolis: n.p., 1918), 48-54; Woodworth-Etter, Divine Healing: Health for Body, Soul and Spirit (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1923]), an unpaginated tract located in the Woodworth-Etter Papers, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Assemblies of God, Springfield, MO (hereafter, AOG). The belief that Satan caused all illness was com-monplace in incipient Pentecostalism. See Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition/' 523-24; Anderson, Vision, 95-96. As Anderson suggests, "Healing and 'casting out demons' were almost synonymous terms in Pentecostal vocabulary" (95). In addition to per-sonal sins, Woodworth-Etter stressed that the sins of parents could be the proxi-mate cause of sickness in children. Likewise, the faith of parents could claim the blessing of healing in dire cases, such as that of a girl in Springfield, Illinois, suffering from spinal meningitis and paralysis, who was in no condition to exercise her own faith. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 94-95.

20. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim; "Cancer Cured by Faith," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 3 Sept. 1887,12.

21. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75; idem, Signs and Wonders, 187-96,223-33, 535; "Pentecostal Power," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890; Feick, comp., Life and Testimony, 24. For interpretations of early Pentecostal restorationism and millennial-ism, see Grant Wacker, "Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecos-talism," in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 196-219; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel; Anderson, Vision; and Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith.

22. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75,122-27; Woodworth-Etter, Questions and Answers on Divine Healing, rev. and enl. (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1922]), 23. Warner, Woman Evangelist, 194-99, has demonstrated that significant portions of Questions and Answers (a large part of which was first published in Life and Experience [1904], 258-74) were lifted verbatim without attribution from J. W. Byers, The Grace of Healing (Moundsville, W.Va.: Gospel Trumpet, 1899), 265-85. Byers was a minister with the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.). Nevertheless, the material accurately reflects the teachings of Woodworth-Etter throughout her ministry.


Newspaper reports of a Woodworth-Etter camp meeting revival near Urbana, Illinois, from late July through late August 1887, offer a glimpse of her healing ministry early in her career. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat provided a detailed account. Woodworth-Etter's "magnetic influence communicated itself mysteriously to her entire audience" of about two thousand, the paper reported. At every ser-vice in "that alleged cradle of infidelity," there were rows of people three and four deep at the altar praying for salvation or healing, including prominent citizens.

After two or three meetings, and when the people had been worked up to a degree of religious intensity, Mrs. Woodworth began her ministrations among the sick Eye-witnesses, residents of Urbana, describe the scenes which then took place as the personifi-cation of frenzy. When the excitement was at its whitest heat Mrs. Woodworth seemed ubiquitous. One moment she would face her shrieking auditors from the platform, wringing her hands, screaming to God for mercy in a voice that sounded high and shrill above the wailings of her congregation; the next, prostrate upon her face, tearing her hair, and writhing in the imaginary embrace of some demon from below; then flying about among the people, encourag-ing, arguing, commanding them to help her drive the fiend from their midst; again upon the stage, stamping her feet tragically upon the imaginary form of the "Old Boy" himself, and then, as the great climax to her exhausting efforts, shrieking "victory!" at the full power of her lungs.

Amidst the resulting pandemonium, Woodworth-Etter called forward those who desired healing, "and with each demonstration of her certainly inexplicable power the enthusiasm would break out anew," with hundreds hurling themselves to the ground, crying out to God for mercy for their sins.23

According to the Globe-Democrat, Woodworth-Etter then ap-proached an old deaf farmer named Grover who suffered from severe back pain. She laid her hands on his ears and yelled that he was deaf no more, then repeated the procedure with his back. Afterwards she moved toward a Mrs. Harris lying on her cot. A resident of Urbana, Harris had been a paralytic for twenty years. Woodworth-Etter pro-claimed to the audience, "The success of this crucial test should convince you all that God's power is present among you." She pro-ceeded to ask Harris if she believed in God and whether, if healed, she would devote her remaining years to his service. Upon receiving an affirmative reply, Woodworth-Etter commanded her, "Then, in God's

23. "Cancer Cured by Faith/' 12.

746 CHURCH HISTORY

name, get up and walk!" Harris lifted her head briefly, then laid it back down on the cot. Woodworth-Etter cried out, "The Lord of heaven commands you to rise!" Harris, who looked "unconscious of what she was doing[,] put her feet on the floor and stood erect before the multitude." The crowd surged forward as Woodworth-Etter car-ried the unsteady Harris to the platform and urged her to help convert the people. Harris proceeded to speak with great eloquence in spite of her limited education. Thereafter another woman, with advanced breast cancer declared incurable by her doctors, sought healing. Woodworth-Etter had her promise never to take any medicine except God's healing power, then laid hands on her breast and asked her to pray in faith. One of the physicians who had attended her case witnessed the healing and declared it miraculous.24

Such scenes provoked significant controversy. The Champaign County Herald disputed the veracity of the claims in the Globe-Democrat account, suggesting the cures were fabrications, perhaps planted by someone in Woodworth-Etter's camp. Two weeks earlier the Herald had called Woodworth-Etter's methods "primitive," but said that her meetings were producing good and that "it takes different ways to reach all people." The paper also noted "[f]lying reports . . . of wonderful cures of disease performed by Mrs. Woodworth." Citing her "wonderful magnetic power over those with whom she comes in contact," the Herald granted that she could cure "nervous diseases that are more imaginary than real," but doubted her capacity with "diseases of a strictly physical or deep seated character." The wealthy Urbana banker S. H. Busey reported after the revival that nearly one hundred had converted, including himself. The "Woodworth converts" gathered twice a week for prayer meet-ings; later, members of established churches started to join them. This reflected Woodworth-Etter's general pattern of trying to plant churches or prayer bands before departing an area.26

24. Ibid. 25. "A Cheerful Liar/' Champaign County Herald, 7 Sept. 1887; "The Camp Meeting/'

Champaign County Herald, 24 Aug. 1887, 1. Newspaper accounts of healing revivals commonly made this distinction between nervous and physical diseases. Dr. T. J. Bowles of Muncie, Indiana, for example, offered a psychological explanation for Woodworth-Etter's cure of Mrs. C. P. Diltz, whose "paralysis of the will" had led to her total physical helplessness. "A Case That Passes for a Faith Cure Reported from Madison County," 2.

26. S. H. Busey to the editor, The Church Advocate (Harrisburg, Penn.), 14 Sept. 1887,4. This was the denominational organ of Woodworth-Etter's Church of God (Winebren-nerian). For the heavy opposition her ministry provoked in the church, see C. H. Forney, History of the Churches of God in the United States of North America (n.p.: Churches of God, 1914), 237, 356-57. "Cancer Cured by Faith," 12, identifies Busey as


A savvy self-promoter and controversialist, Woodworth-Etter pub-lished at least eight versions of her journal-style autobiography be-tween the early 1880s and 1922, with another published in 1925 by August Feick, her successor at the Woodworth-Etter Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Sold at her meetings, these volumes recounted her re-vival and healing triumphs. Unlike Dowie and Parham, she did not produce a periodical to publicize her ministry, other than a monthly called The Bible Truth that lasted only several issues in 1892.27 Though newspapers often expressed hostility to Woodworth-Etter, she recog-nized the value of publicity, good or bad, and cultivated it accord-ingly. Sensational reports and sharp controversies drew crowds, and the power of God convicted them.

Fearless and defiant, Woodworth-Etter took her confrontational style to places other revivalists would sooner have skipped. She first gained national publicity through her massive revival in Hartford City, Indiana, in early 1885. According to one nearby editor, who criticized her methods as containing too much of the "biggest show on earth/' Hartford City was a rough place, but Woodworth-Etter was up to the challenge: "A town of more iniquity and bad odors to the square inch it has never been my misfortune to encounter. A more importunate set of gamblers and whiskey-sellers and a dirtier set of loafers have never escaped the penitentiary Mrs. Woodworth has undoubtedly shown great wisdom in her manner of converting Hart-ford City. She goes at it like a foot pad tackles his prey. By some supernatural power she just knocks 'em silly when they are not looking for it, and while they are down she applies the hydraulic pressure and pumps the grace of God into them by the bucketful.28" Woodworth-Etter faced scoffers at many of her revivals. She en-tranced some and warned others: "The Lord will send a terrible wrath on those who mock His religion by frivolous conduct in these meet-ings Mockers, marked with His curse, have met with swift pun-ishment, death, suicide, sickness or failure."29

Though little-known today outside holiness and Pentecostal circles, Maria Woodworth-Etter was the most prominent female revivalist in

the "millionaire banker" of Urbana. Woodworth, Trials and Triumphs, 156; "Pentecostal Power," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890.

27. Warner, Woman Evangelist, 192-94. 28. Kokomo Dispatch (Indiana), 5 Feb. 1885, 5. "Rigid Religion," Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 Jan.

1885,1, reported that businessmen and saloonkeepers in Hartford City closed early for lack of business and to attend Woodworth-Etter's meetings.

29. "Mobbed Mrs. Woodworth," Missouri Republican (St. Louis), 18 June 1890, and "After Battle," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 10 Dec. 1889, 1, provide examples of the mob violence and death threats Woodworth-Etter braved. Fort Wayne Gazette, 23 Jan. 1885, 6; "Mockers to Meet with Punishment," Indianapolis Star, 27 Sept. 1904, 3.

748 CHURCH HISTORY

the United States prior to Aimee Semple McPherson. As it did for McPherson, divine healing served as a hallmark for Woodworth-Etter's ministry, the source of both the great crowds and the conflict that followed her. For Woodworth-Etter, healings demonstrated God's presence in surpassing power through the ministrations of the Holy Spirit, and his desire to free captives from Satan's shackles. Foremost among signs and wonders, healings confirmed her mission to restore the purity and power of the apostolic church in anticipation of the millennium.

II. PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE'S ZION

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May 1847, John Alexander Dowie moved with his family to Australia as an adolescent. A sickly youth, Dowie first experienced divine healing as a sixteen-year-old, when he was saved from approaching death by God's concession to his ulti-matum that he would abandon the faith if he were not healed. After pursuing theological studies at the University of Edinburgh, he re-turned to Australia and became ordained in the Congregational Church in 1872. In 1876, while serving in Newton, a suburb of Sydney, Dowie embraced divine healing in the midst of an epidemic, after burying more than forty of his church members in the prior few weeks. Deeply disturbed by the loss of life, Dowie rejected the tradi-tional view that sickness and death were part of God's inscrutable will. "I was almost frenzied," he recounted years later, "with Divinely imparted anger and hatred of that foul destroyer, disease, which was doing Satan's will." Dowie then commenced his healing ministry; but it was not until 1882, after the death of his daughter and a move to Melbourne, that he made it the focus of his labors.30

30. James L. Dwyer, "Elijah the Third," American Mercury, July 1927, 291-92; John Alexander Dowie, "The Chains of Good and Evil," A Voice From Zion [hereafter, VFZ], Jan. 1905, 15-16; Dowie, "He Is Just the Same Today," VFZ, Jan. 1900,10-13; Dowie, "Zion's Protest Against Swine's Flesh as a Disease-Producer," VFZ, June 1898, 17; Grant Wacker, "Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian Community," Church History 54 (1985): 498. The best sources for Dowie's years in Australia are Edna Sheldrake, comp., The Personal Letters of John Alexander Dowie (Zion City, 111.: Wilbur Glenn Voliva, 1912); and Gordon Lindsay, The Life of John Alexander Dowie . . . (n.p.: Voice of Healing, 1951), 17-89. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves," Leaves of Healing, 24 July 1897, 609, contains a cryptic reference by Dowie that appears to suggest the death of ids daughter was associated with epilepsy, and that it prompted his full entrance into the ministry of healing. Lindsay, Life of Dowie, 70, quotes an uncited letter from Dowie to a friend that says his daughter suffered from a "fit" and was "insensible," and that she also may have had the measles. Sheldrake, Personal Letters of Dowie, 318-22, contains the full text of the letter. See also "How God Gave Dowie the Ministry of Healing," in The Sermons of John Alexander Dowie, Champion of the Faith, ed. Gordon Lindsay (n.p.: Voice of Healing, n.d.), 22-28. The secondary literature


In 1888 Dowie traveled to the United States to establish satellites of his International Divine Healing Association. After two successful years on the West coast convinced him America was fertile soil for his healing ministry, Dowie moved his operations to Chicago in 1890.31

From there he itinerated in the eastern half of the U.S. and in parts of Canada until 1893, when he established a divine-healing tabernacle across from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and near Dwight L. Moody's evangelistic crusade at the Chicago World's Fair. The claims of miraculous healings that followed Dowie wherever he went gen-erated enormous publicity for his ministry, and crowds multiplied when the economy soured in the spring of 1894.32 His success prompted Dowie to establish, later that year, a wide-ranging ministry he called Zion, which involved several divine healing homes, and publications including his influential weekly, Leaves of Healing. In 1896 Dowie formed the Christian Catholic Church, and in 1901 building began on his Christian Utopian community, Zion City, Illinois, which peaked at around seven thousand, five hundred residents several years later. During the height of his ministry, from 1894 to 1905, Dowie unquestionably reigned as the most important and notorious divine healer in America.

on Dowie is extensive, though much of it dates before 1930. Among more recent works, see Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 116-35; Wacker, Marching to Zion; Mullin, Miracles, 203-8; Edith L. Blumhofer, "The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the Apostolic Faith: A Study in the 1906 Pentecostal Revival/' in Charismatic Experiences in History, ed. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1985), 126-46; Chappell, "Divine Healing Movement/' 284-340; Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996); and Alden Heath, "Apostle in Zion," Journal of the Illinois State Historcal Society 70 (1977): 98-113.

31. For Dowie's early ministry on the West Coast, see John Alexander Dowie, American First Fruits, Being a Brief Record of Eight Months' Divine Healing Missions in the State of California, 4th ed. (Chicago: Zion, 1895); Dowie, Our Second Year's Harvest, Being a Brief Record of a Year of Divine Healing Missions on the Pacific Coast of America . . . (Chicago: International Divine Healing Association, 1891); Dowie, "Divine Healing Vindicated," VFZ, Sept. 1898, 21-23; "J. A. Dowie's Cures," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 16 Apr. 1890; Freeman D. Bovard, "Dowie's Story of the Pacific Coast," Christian Advocate, 10 Dec. 1903, 2001-2; and Robert C. Reinders, "Training for a Prophet: The West Coast Missions of John Alexander Dowie, 1888-1890," Pacific Historian 30 (1986): 3-14.

32. Cook, Zion City, 12-13; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 498. 33. Cook, Zion City is the most thorough account of the city (later renamed Zion) under

Dowie. For other views of its early days, see Jabez Taylor, The Development of the City of Zion (Zion, 111: n.p., n.d.); Grover Townshend, "A City of the Plains," Munsey's Magazine, Sept. 1902,843-45; and I. K. Friedman, "John Alexander Dowie," Everybody's Magazine, Nov. 1903,567-75. "Who's Who in Zion," Zion Historical Society ser. 4 (1971): 1-30, box 59, file 16, John W. Carver Healing Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Ky. (hereafter, ATS), identifies key figures in Zion both during and after Dowie's lifetime. P. G. Chappell, "Healing Movements," in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 366-67, claims Dowie as the most prominent American divine healer between 1894 and 1905. Various accounts put the

750 CHURCH HISTORY

In his prime Dowie packed auditoriums in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere with ten to fifteen thousand participants. Week after week he preached to crowds of six to eight thousand in Chicago and Zion City. Whereas Woodworth-Etter's ministry of healing focused on ecstatic behavior caused by the power of the Holy Spirit, Dowie had a teaching ministry. Order characterized his meetings, which often included healing testimonials but centered on Dowie and his lengthy sermons. These were anything but boring. Dowie had the talents and charisma of a demagogue, offering a dichotomous, moralistic reading of life that was one minute winsome and the next rhetorically violent. His commanding bass voice was rhythmic and spellbinding, filled with emotion and weightiness. Masterful at connecting with his crowds, he drew them in and reinforced his teaching by eliciting audience participation and applying his engaging, if barbed, sense of humor. Throughout the occasional eruptions of applause, laughter, or seemingly impromptu interactions, Dowie remained in complete con-trol.34

Restorationism drove Dowie's larger theological project. He re-garded Zion as the Lord's designated force for restoring the power and purity of the apostolic church and hastening the premillennial return of Christ. If his millennialism was not quite as urgent as Woodworth-Etter's, his restorationism was more so. Like her, he preached individual empowerment and purification, but he also sought to embody apostolic glory in his church, in Zion City, and in himself. Dowie bolstered his authority by assuming the mantle of prophetic office. In March 1899 he announced that he was the "Mes-senger of God's Covenant'7 referred to in Mai. 3:1. In June 1901 he additionally declared himself "Elijah the Restorer," the third incarna-tion of the Old Testament prophet (John the Baptist having been the second). Finally, in September 1904, he proclaimed himself also the "First Apostle of the Lord Jesus."35

membership of the Christian Catholic Church in 1900 at between twenty-five and fifty thousand; see Wacker, "Marching to Zion/' 502.

34. Just about any of Dowie's sermons display the characteristics mentioned here. See, for example, John Alexander Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers Concerning Divine Heal-ing Teaching," VFZ, July 1900, 1-31. John Alexander Dowie, sound recording, 1903, Carver Healing Collection, ATS. Dowie proved adept at handling the rare opposition that arose in his meetings. See, for example, Dowie, "'Christ's Methods of Healing': Reply to the Exposition of the Sunday School Lesson by the Rev. Dr. John Lindsay Withrow, Pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church, Chicago, in the [Chicago] Record of Jan. 8,1898," VFZ, May 1898, 28. Like Woodworth-Etter, Dowie suggested that death would come to mockers of divine healing. Dowie, "Lessons on Divine Healing from the Story of the Leper," VFZ, Dec. 1900,12.

35. John Alexander Dowie, "The Coming of Elijah, Restorer of All Things," VFZ, July 1901, 8-57; Dowie, "Power of the Covenant of Final Restoration...," VFZ, Oct. 1902, 27 ff;


Divine healing supplied the foundation for Dowie's restorationism. His apostolic authorityand by extension that of his church and communityrested ultimately on his gifts of healing. Crowds flocked to Dowie and devoted their lives to him because of his extraordinary capacity to induce physical restoration. Even his critics were amazed: "His success was not limited to cases of hypochondria [PJilgrims came on crutches and went away whole. Paralytics were borne in on litters, and literally 'took up their beds and walked/" Regardless of his topic, Dowie almost invariably returned to divine healing in his sermons, and his Leaves of Healing offered a continuous stream of healing narratives.36 Healing formed the experiential core of his ministry, the palpable conduit of divine grace to the suffering.

Dowie preached a straightforward message with the basic premise that "God cannot make you sick." Like Woodworth-Etter, Dowie argued that God never ordained that Christians become ill or disabled. "The greatest lie that was ever uttered concerning the Word of God since the [Reformation," he thundered, "is to be found in Christian theologya lie that has been the abomination of the Church and its pollution; a lie which has made it incapable of sustaining its position; a lie which asserts that God worked in such a way as to be the author of or the willing permitter of sin or disease; the Calvinistic lie . . . the infernal lie to which in my boyhood days I had to listen."37

Dowie mocked ministers who taught that God chastens those he loves for their greater good, inscrutable though it may be:

[I]f disease is a love-token as the ministers preach, why do they not practice it? I heard one the other day that said the Grippe came to him; he found himself gripped. Did he kneel down and say, 'Whom the Lord love He chasteneth; it is so good for you to give me Grippe. (Laughter.) Oh, how you do love me. (Laughter.) Oh, how you love me. Oh Lord, just love my wife Jennie too, and give her the Grippe. (Laughter.) And love Betty too; let her have the Grippe. Oh let us all be loved and gripped?' No he did not They are only a pack of clerical fools or liars who preach that; because the very moment they get sick they send off for [the] doctor . . . to come and take the Lord's love token away. (Laughter and applause.)38

Dowie, "The Principles, Practices and Purposes of the Christian Catholic Church in Zion," VFZ, Aug. 1900, 3-15; Dowie, "Faith the Mightiest Power," VFZ, Oct. 1904,13; Cook, Zion City, 57-59,171-73.

36. John Swain, "John Alexander Dowie: The Prophet and His Profits," Century Magazine, Oct. 1902, 937.

37. John Alexander Dowie, " Will': An Address on Divine Healing With Answers to Questions," VFZ, Sept. 1897, 20-21; Dowie, "Satan the Dfiler," VFZ, Feb. 1900, 23.

38. Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers," 28-29.

752 CHURCH HISTORY

Instead, asserted Dowie, God wills that Christians experience now the sanctification of the body as well as of the spirit. Since he has provided for this in Christ's atonement, it is never appropriate for a believer to pray for God's already clear will when seeking healing. All Christians who truly repent of their sins and claim the promise in faith are healed. As the root cause of illness, Satan "wields such stupendous power that if we did not know God overrules all things and will ultimately triumph, we would despair of humanity/' Even more than Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and other incipient Pentecostals, Dowie stressed the pervasive, assailing nature of Satan. God called upon his children to do battle with the devil and his minionsand Dowie was not at all reticent to name them. Anyone who opposed him in any fashion he branded a tool of Satan. Atop the lengthy list were physi-cians, for whom his enmity burned with holy fire; others included pastors and churches, tobacco and pork manufacturers, municipal politicians, and even other divine healers.39

In his healing homeswhich provided lodging and intense teach-ing and prayer for the sickor after his services in designated prayer rooms, Dowie would meet individually or in small groups with patients, laying his hands upon them and praying. He also prayed for the thousands of requests sent by mail. In 1890 Dowie met F. A. Graves during a healing mission in Minneapolis. Orphaned at the age of eight, Graves had suffered from epilepsy for twenty years and "was constantly using medicine but getting no relief." Having learned of divine healing the year before, he attended several of Dowie's meet-ings. Dowie then saw him in his home shortly after Graves almost drowned while having an epileptic fit during a bath, causing an internal hemorrhage and vomiting of large amounts of blood. Seven years later, Dowie described the scene: "He had the teaching, and I knew he was a man of God. I put my hand upon his body, and asked God that the hemorrhage should cease. It ceased that moment. I prayed t o o . . . for his deliverance from epilepsy. A day or so after-

39. Ibid., 17; Dowie, "Jesus the Healer/7 VFZ, Feb. 1900, 3; "Divine Healing Vindicated/' 34-35; "Talks With Ministers on Divine Healing," VFZ, June 1897, 4; "Satan the Dfiler," 19. Dowie stressed individual human sin as the proximate cause of illness, though he also intimated it could be inherited. See Dowie, "Do You Know God's Way of Healing?" VFZ, Jan. 1900, 5; and '"I Will/" 41. For examples of his demonizing, see Dowie, Zion's Holy War Against the Hosts of Hell in Chicago (Chicago: Zion, 1900); Zion's Conflict With Methodist Apostasy, Especially in Connection With Freemasonry (Chicago: Zion, 1900). For his attack on Woodworth-Etter, see "Trance Evangelism," Leaves of Healing, 8 Mar. 1895, 380-82. He also savaged Martin Wells Knapp, a radical holiness healer in Cincinnati, in "Spurious holiness Exposed," 12, and A. B. Simpson, head of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and a noted divine healer, in "The Great Neglected Chapter/' Leaves of Healing, 25 Sept. 1897, 762-67.


wards he suddenly realized . . . that God had not only spared his life, blessed him and stopped the hemorrhage, but he realized he was delivered from epilepsy/' Dowie further stated that during the first three years after this incident "there were attempts on the part of the enemy to take possession of [Graves] again, but I co-operated with him in prayer quite frequently, and for four years now the deliverance has been perfect." Graves, who was present as Dowie's account was read in Zion Tabernacle, certified its accuracy and told how he had played the organ and led the singing at a YMCA convention two days after the incident. "I stand before you, friends, a miracle of grace and God's power."40

Before turning to divine healing, Dowie's patients had tried various medical regimens without success. Maggie E. Parsons of Madison, Wisconsin had been incapacitated for five years with "severe uterine trouble, displacement, adhesion, and inflammation. My husband's death in the meantime," she explained, "greatly aggravated the dis-ease and completely prostrated me." Parsons tried numerous regular doctors, the "rest cure," magnetic healing, and a six-month stay at the Seventh-Day Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium, under the care of Dr. J. H. Kellogg. Two noted physicians then told her that a hysterotomy held out her only hope for health. Instead, she decided to visit one of Dowie's divine healing homes in Chicago. "[0]ne clasp of this good man's hand, one look into his face/' Parsons exulted, "and I knew I was indeed in the presence of God's servant, and that through him would I not only receive this physical blessing, but spiritual blessing." After Dowie laid hands upon her in prayer a few days later, she "was free from all pain, and made whole from the very hour." Parsons stayed at the home for nine weeks, with no further distress. Upon her return to Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal carried her story of "Remarkable Healing."41

fri September 1905 Dowie suffered a stroke before his flock in Shiloh Tabernacle at Zion City. The impact of his illness combined with

40. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves/7 609-11, 621; 611. Dowie believed epilepsy resulted from demon possession.

41. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Maggie E. Parsons," Leaves of Healing, 28 Sept. 1894, 65-67; 66 (the Wisconsin State Journal account is reprinted on 67). For "women's diseases" and the sometimes barbaric way the medical community treated them around the turn of the century, see Russett, Sexual Science; Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue, 69-92. The illnesses of Maggie Parsons and many other patients Dowie cured are open to psychosomatic interpretations, but others are less so. Blindness, deafness, shortened limbs, typhoid fever and countless other afflictions yielded to Dowie's touch. See, for example, A. W. N., "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Quickly Healed of Lameness, Tumor, Rheumatic Gout, and Spinal Curvature," Leaves of Healing, 23 May 1903,129-30; and Jane Dowie, "How Jesus Heals the Little Ones," VFZ, Feb. 1901, 1-35.

754 CHURCH HISTORY

allegations of financial and sexual misdeeds to bring about his down-fall. By the time of his death in March 1907, Dowie had been forsaken by all but a handful of his followers. Though Dowie never became Pentecostal, and Zion continued after his death in the radical holiness tradition, many former Zion members became leaders in early Pen-tecostalism. After Dowie's grip on Zion loosened as a result of his failing health and a campaign of vilification directed by his successor, Wilbur Glenn Voliva, a young Midwestern evangelist saw an oppor-tunity to make inroads into Zion City. Charles Parham's visit to Zion City in the fall of 1906 marked the beginning of the city's Pentecostal revival that eventually channeled Dowie's legacy, and many of his most capable disciples, into the fledgling Pentecostal movement.42

III. CHARLES F. PARHAM'S APOSTOLIC HEALING

Charles F. Parham was the theological founder of Pentecostalism, and his student, William J. Seymour, led the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906 that sparked its worldwide spread. Born in Muscatine, Iowa, in June 1873, at six months of age Parham contracted a nearly fatal fever, likely caused by encephalitis, that imperiled his health for the next five years. After his family moved to the frontier region of Sedgwick County, Kansas, in 1878, Parham continued in poor health. Several years later, at the age of nine, he contracted rheumatic fever, which emaciated him and stunted his growth. Due to his illnesses and generally weak constitution, Parhamunlike his four brotherswas unable to perform demanding work on the family farm. He closely identified with his mother, who nursed him and

42. For an account of Dowie's downfall, see William E. Barton, "The Dream of Dowie and the Awakening of Zion," The Independent, 12 Apr. 1906, 915-17. Concerning the financial allegations against Dowie, proof of deliberate fraud is lacking, though it is clear he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle as Zion City's economy crumbled after 1903. Rumors circulated about Dowie's undue fondness for Ruth Hofer, a young Swiss deaconess living in Zion City in 1904-5, and about his supposed plans for a polygamous colony in Mexico. See Cook, Zion City, 204-5, 200-201, 159; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 507-8. Donna Quaife Knoth, "John Alexander Dowie: White Lake's Healing Evange-list," Michigan History, May/June 1990, 36-38, tells of the expensive summer home where the Dowies vacationed after 1899. For newspaper accounts of these and other controversies surrounding Dowie, see the Hannah Whitall Smith Papers, "Fanaticism Collection," box 6, files 19-25, ATS. Gordon P. Gardiner, Out of Zion and Into the World (Shippensburg, Perm.: Companion Press, 1990), identifies many former Dowie follow-ers who assumed leadership in early Pentecostalism. On Parham, see Blumhofer, "The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the Apostolic Faith"; Edith Blumhofer, "A Pentecostal Branch Grows in Dowie's Zion: Charles F. Parham's 1906 Invasion," Assemblies of God Heritage, Fall 1986,3-5. The Waukegan Daily Gazette, based in Wauke-gan, Illinois, adjacent to Zion City, covered events in the fall of 1906. See, for example, "Dowie Loses Zion," 19 Sept. 1906; "Is Voliva's Hold in Danger?" 26 Sept. 1906; "Declare Parham Is Gaining," 28 Sept. 1906.


supervised his light household chores. Her death in 1885 was a terrible blow to Parham, who often spoke fondly of her in later years.43

Parham enrolled in Southwestern Kansas College to study for the ministry. Once there, however, he became interested in medicine. He later wrote: "Having been an invalid for many years, the devil sug-gested that it would be a great philanthropic work to become a physician; to relieve suffering humanity, and then, by and by, have a nice home and some ease and comfort in the world The devil tried to make me believe I could be a physician and a Christian too/7

Parham acceded to Satan's wiles and then suffered a recurrence of rheumatic fever, which left his doctors helpless and his life endan-gered. After several months of suffering, he repented in prayer and yielded his life to God, who healed him. Another healing experience followed some months later, but it was not until Parham was twenty-four years old that he fully "realized the mighty power of God in sanctifying the body from disease as He had from inbred sin."44

Following two years in the Methodist ministry, Parham struck out on his own as an independent evangelist. In the fall of 1897, Parham faced another serious illness, which his physician diagnosed as heart disease. Simultaneously, his infant son took deathly ill with a raging fever that doctors could not bring under control. These dangers prompted Parham to embrace the full implications of divine healing, including renouncing doctors and medicine and trusting God alone for healing. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie before him, Parham reasoned that relying on human means of healing constituted putting one's faith in "works" rather than in God and his gracious provision. Shortly after Parham and his son recovered, Parham established in 1898 the Bethel Healing Home in Topeka, Kansas, as part of a broad holiness social and evangelistic mission. By the fall of 1900, he had established Bethel Bible College on the outskirts of Topeka, where Parham and his students identified speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism on New Year's Day, 1901. In the years following,

43. Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham: Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement (1930; reprint, New York: Garland, 1985), 1-2; James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 23-26. Along with Goff s biography, secondary sources n Parham include: Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 158-86; Anderson, Vision, 47-61; Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 89-92; and Chappell, "Divine Healing Movement/7 340-57.

44. Parham, Life of Parham, 6; Charles F. Parham, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, 4th ed. (1944 [1902]; reprinted in The Sermons of Charles F. Parham, New York: Garland, 1985), 15-18.

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Parham's healing ministry played a vital role in his efforts to spread his version of Pentecostalism, which he Called the "Apostolic Faith.//45

Parham combined the practices of Woodworth-Etter and Dowie by healing both in revivals and in private settings. With minor variations, he shared the same healing theology and the same basic message: God does not will sickness for his children, and faith will secure his healing power. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie, Parham identified Satan as the ultimate source of all sickness, but he recognized a minor role for God's permissive will in allowing sickness to come to the disobedient. More clearly than the others, Parham articulated an understanding of healing as the physical expression of sanctification. Though enthusi-astic, Parham's revivals were sedate in comparison with Woodworth-Etter's. Generally, he preferred to conduct healings in private and to avoid the sensationalism that attended healing revivalismthough some of his greatest successes were in revivals. His healing home in Topeka, like Dowie's larger homes in Chicago, served as the divine-healing equivalent of a hospital. In both settings, Parham's magnetism won over his patients. A contemporary described him as "a slight, spare man" who was "extremely delicate looking" owing to his early health problems, but who "possessed such a wonderful personality that some . . . accused him of hypnotizing his followers." Unlike Woodworth-Etter and Dowie, Parham never claimed to possess the gifts of healing, though his wife Sarah believed he had been granted them, at least for a time.46

Ora Harris of Ottawa, Kansas, was a typical patient of Parham's. She had suffered from consumption, stomach and bowel problems, and poor eyesight for ten years, living off of a government invalid's pension. Six doctors examined her in early 1898 and gave her two

45. Parham, Life of Parham, 31-33; Goff, Fields White, 38-39. Contemporary news accounts suggest something of the stir caused by the outbreak of glossolala in 1901: "A Queer Faith," TopeL Daily Capital 6 Jan. 1901, 2; "New Sect in Kansas Speaks with Strange Tongues," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Jan. 1901; "Parham's New Religion Practiced at 'Stone's Folly/" Kansas City Times, 27 Jan. 1901; and "New Religion 'Discovered' at 'Stone's Folly' Near Topeka," TopeL Mail & Breeze, 22 Feb. 1901. "Stone's Folly" was the local name given to the eclectic, unfinished mansion that housed Parham's school. See John W. Ripley, "Erastus Stone's Dream CastleBirthplace of Pentecostalism," Shawnee County Historical Bulletin, June 1975, 42-53.

46. For Parham's healing theology and practices, see Parham, Life of Parham, 29-50; Parham, Voice Crying, 39-52; Robert L. Parham, comp., Selected Sermons of the Late Charles F. Parham, Sarah E. Parham: Co-Founders of the Original Apostolic Faith Movement (Baxter Springs, Kans: Apostolic Faith Bible College, 1941), 23-50; "Healing," Apostolic Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug. 1905,1-6; Charles F. Parham, Divine Health, tract (Baxter Springs, Kans.: Apostolic Faith Paper, n.d.); and Goff, Fields White, 41-42. For healing as an expression of sanctification, see Parham, Voice Crying, 50-52. The contemporary description is from "Three Months of Religious Fervor," Joplin Daily News Herald (Mo.), 24 Jan. 1904,11. For Sarah Parham, see Parham, Life of Parham, 33.


weeks to live. Shortly thereafter, in a meeting in the old Salvation Army Hall in Ottawa, Harris "knelt with assurance that I would be every whit whole . . . . When Brothers Parham and Duby said to me: 'Sister, receive thy healing in the name of Jesus ' . . . [a] great tearing-loose sensation passed through my chest, and lo! I was instantly healed." Within days she was doing the family washing and scrub-bing floors. She soon took up sewing for a living, gave up her pension, and married, later raising several children.47

When Parham attempted to spread the experience of speaking in tongues in the two years following the Topeka outbreak, he met with great frustration. In February 1901, Parham told his audience at the Academy of Music in Kansas City, "Our religion is capable of dem-onstration and the people will be made to believe when the proper time comes. We will convince people that God is a reality." The proper time did not come, however, until Parham returned the focus of his ministry from glossolalia to healing in the summer of 1903. He then found an audience receptive to his message at El Dorado Springs, Missouri, a health resort that drew sufferers from great distances seeking a "water cure" for their ailments. Parham preached outdoors at the entrance to the springs, drawing in hundreds on their way to the waters. Fascinating to some and repulsive to others, glossolalia did not attract the same crowds for Parham as did healing, perhaps because of its lack of accessible verification. The healed body of a long-standing invalid offered more powerful testimony to outsiders than strange noises that received a favorable interpretation from an insider.48

A notable healing in El Dorado Springs was that of Mary A. Arthur, a prominent citizen of Galena, Kansas, who had suffered for fourteen years with dyspepsia, prolapsis, hemorrhoids, and "paralysis of the bowels." Upon her return to Galena, where her poor health was common knowledge, she invited Parham to hold meetings in town. Three months into the engagement in the winter of 1903-4, a news-paper in nearby Joplin, Missouri, claimed that more than one thou-sand had been healed and eight hundred converted through the

47. Ora (Harris) Childers, "Consumption," Apostolic Faith (Topeka), 22 Mar. 1899, 5; Parham, Life of Parham, 34. Parham published his periodical Apostolic Faith from several different locations between 1899 and 1906; by May 1906, he had settled it in Baxter Springs, Kansas.

48. "Story of His Beliefs," Kansas City Times, 4 Feb. 1901; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 52-53; Parham, Life of Parham, 87. "Was a Pentecost," Kansas City Journal, 22 Jan. 1901, 1, describes an unsuccessful meeting in Kansas City at which Parham focused on glossolalia and seems not to have discussed healing.

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ministry of "the Divine Healer/' with patients coming from a hundred-mile radius around Galena.49

When Parham took the Apostolic Faith to Texas in 1905, healing again proved central to its spread. His meetings in Houston generated broad interest after the healing of Mrs. J. M. Dulaney, wife of a noted local attorney. Dulaney had endured total paralysis of the left side of her body and awful spasms since receiving an electric shock during a streetcar accident in November 1902. She and her husband had in-curred $2,300 in medical bills, only to have her pronounced incurable and likely near death. The Dulaneys' lawsuit against the streetcar company publicized her condition in Houston. Dulaney later re-counted that, in response to prayer in May 1905, she had seen a vision of a man whom she had never met and who would heal her. Three months later she saw Parham preaching on a street corner. Recogniz-ing him as the man in her vision, she and her husband attended his meeting in Bryan Hall two nights later. After Parham and his workers had been singing and praying for Dulaney for ten to fifteen minutes, she heard a voice say, "Arise and go, my child." According to a local paper, "Mrs. Dulaney arose from her chair and walked about the hall in a state of ecstatic joy shouting, clapping her hands, and praising the Lord for restoration. The incident created much excitement. Mrs. Dulaney walked down the stairs from the hall and went home. She has attended their meetings daily since, but not in the chair, and is still rejoicing and praising God for her recovery."50

Several months after Dulaney's healing, Parham established a Bible school in Houston. One of his students and converts to Pentecostalism was the African-American holiness evangelist William Seymour, him-self a practitioner of divine healing. In early 1906, Seymour received an offer to help pastor a small holiness mission in Los Angeles. When the leaders of the mission rejected his Parham-derived teaching on tongues, Seymour held a series of meetings that led to the famous

49. Parham, Life of Parham, 88-89; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 53; "Three Months of Religious Fervor/' 11. Directly below the Daily News Herald story, an advertisement promised "No More Aches and Pains" to women suffering menstrual difficulties, which can drive "women into the direst stages of nervous excitement." Mrs. Anna D. Moore, Vice President of the United Daughters' Industrial Club in New Orleans, testified that after only twenty-two bottles of Wine of Cardui her problems ceased.

50. Parham, Life of Parham, 113-15; Goff, Fields White, 96-97; Suburbanite (Houston Heights, Tex.), 12 Aug. 1905, quoted in Goff, Fields White, 97. One of Parham's workers wrote to her family in the days preceding Dulaney's healing: "Each week is better & better, but the events of the last few days, simply beggar description " Rilda Cole to "Dear Ones," Houston, Tex., 1 Aug. 1905, Charles F. Parham Papers, AOG. W. W. Gray, "The Houston Meeting," Apostolic Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug. 1905, 8-9, provides another account of the Houston revival.


Azusa Street revival, begun in April 1906. Upon visiting Azusa Street in October 1906, Parham pronounced the movement there a "counterfeit Pentecost," filled with fanaticism, spiritualist and hypnotic influences, and gibberish instead of known foreign languages.51 This rejection, combined with a 1907 arrest in San Antonio on the charge of sodomy, greatly diminished Parham's influence in the growing Pentecostal movement.52

IV. THE FUNCTIONS OF DIVINE HEALING

The healing ministries of Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham suggest that divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism functioned in three primary ways. Most obviously, healing provided the tangible benefit of renewed health. Second, divine healing was the principal means healing evangelists used to fulfill Jesus' mandate in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20) to "make disciples," by attracting, converting, initiating, and assuring believers. Finally, healing authenticated and defined the ministries of the healers, and it augmented their personal power.

The above testimonies and thousands more like them suggest that many people found in healing ministries the physical restoration they sought. Critics claimed that the healed suffered from psychosomatic illnesses susceptible to various forms of suggestion, but many of the healing claims do not yield easily to this explanation. Contemporary

51. Parham, Life of Parham, 163-64; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 61. Until his death in 1929, Parham maintained that true tongues speech was xenoglossolalic, or that it reflected actual foreign languages unknown to the speaker. There is ample evidence to suggest that Parham's negative reaction to Azusa was based in part on his antipathy to racial mixing and equality. Goff, Fields White, 130-32. By contrast, a notable aspect of Dowie's ministry was its interracial nature. Cook, Zion City, 91-97; and "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Emma Parker," Leaves of Healing, 27 Nov. 1896, 65-67. Woodworth-Etter's revivals were sometimes interracial. Willard . Gatewood Jr., ed., Slave and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1979), 126-27. For Seymour and Azusa, see Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 56-62; and Anderson, Vision, 60-61, 65-74.

52. "Evangelist Is Arrested," San Antonio Light, 19 July 1907,1, reported that Parham was arrested, along with a young man, for committing "an unnatural offense." See also "Sensation at San Antonio," Houston Chronicle, 21 July 1907,14; and "Voliva Split Hits Preacher," San Antonio Light, 24 July 1907, 2. Contemporaries and historians agree about the sexual nature of Parham's act, but they disagree as to whether it was sodomy, adultery, or masturbation. By far the most detailed account of the incident is Goff, Fields White, 136-41, and esp. 222-28 nn. 31-53. See also Anderson, Vision, 272-73 n. 8; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 68 n. 82. Parham argued that the charges, for which he was never indicted because of lack of evidence, were false rumors spread by enemies, including Wilbur G. Voliva, Dowie's successor in Zion City. Goff, Fields White, 138-40, shows that Voliva capitalized on the chargesand seemingly embellished themto discredit Parham. Parham's wife Sarah supported him through the ordeal.

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and historical critics also have argued that many claims were exaggerated and perhaps others fabricated, and that even those that seemed genuine usually did not endure. While it is impossible to evaluate the competing assertions with any degree of certainty, the fact remains that large numbers of people experienced sufficient physical changes for Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and especially Dowie to develop mass followings.53

Incipient Pentecostal healers argued that a good and loving God could not coexist with the enduring presence of sickness in Christians and the sin that caused it. They focused heavily on the question of God's will in sickness and healing because this was a central concern of the ill Christians who came to see them. The vast majority of these believers inherited a long tradition of theodicy that suggested that God willed or permitted the sicknesses of those he loved for their greater good, though his purposes might be unclear in the midst of suffering. Sickness thus challenged and enlarged the faith of believers, and it promoted humility, repentance, and perseverance. Whereas Christians in this tradition took comfort in the belief that nothing happened outside the direct or permissive will of God, who could transform human evil into divine good, many of the patients who sought divine healing had found this hope wanting. Instead, these sufferers discovered solace in the belief that sickness was outside the will of God, though remediable by him. They rejoiced with Ellen Tanner, who was healed at Parham's Bethel Healing Home, that God "was not dead or gone on a journey/' but that "His living presence and power" was available to heal agonized bodies.54

Like all those who are seriously sick, divine-healing patients sought to imbue their illness experiences with meaning. But the incapacity of traditional Christian theodicy to provide them with consolation and peace portended the terror of meaningless suffering. Furthermore, as regular medicine professionalized on the basis of its scientific credentials, its ability to offer patients meaningful narratives within which they could situate their illness experiences diminished. Instead, it

53. James Monroe Buckley, Methodist editor of the Christian Advocate, was a prominent critic. See, for example, Christian Advocate, 12 Feb. 1885,102; Christian Advocate, 12 Sept. 1889, 589; and J. M. Buckley, Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena (New York: Century, 1892). Anderson, Vision, 93-94, cites evidence that casts doubt on the claims of both healers and the healed. For studies of the still poorly understood influence of the mind on the body, see Anne Harrington, ed., The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

54. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experience (1904), 215-16, 246; Dowie, " Will'; Apostolic Faith (Topeka), 9 Aug. 1899, 2; Parham, Life of Parham, 43. Tyron L. Inbody, The Transforming God: An Interpretation of Suffering and Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 39-42.


resorted to the notion of chance, which failed to provide compelling answers to the question of why one suffered. Alternative therapies proliferated in the nineteenth century in part to fill this need. When patients went to a Woodworth-Etter revival or to Dowie's Zion, they learned that their sicknesses were part of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, and that God called them to enlist. God desired his children to rebuke Satan and experience complete health, the normative state for those who lived in faithful obedience to his ways. The healing experience thus overturned the idea that God had willed illness, which helps explain the powerful sense of liberation and peace of mind that so often accompanied it.55

Before the sick could assign meaning to their illnesses, they needed a language to express themselves. As Elaine Scarry has suggested, chronic pain is intensely internal and non-communicable, lacking concrete external referents. Persistent physical and mental suffering renders patients inarticulate and even mute, cutting them off from human community by limiting their capacity to extend beyond the confines of the self. In his own way, Dowie understood this at some level: "When you are sick you have no time for others, no matter how much your heart desires it. Your body cries out and cries out, Help, help! Some of the most unselfish people in the world have become the most selfish people through sickness. When you are sick, you hate to think as much of yourself as you are doing. You hate to be a trouble, many of you who are sick, to others, but you cannot help it. You cannot walk. You cannot even feed yourself sometimes, and you are a trouble Those who tell you that disease drives you closer to God, makes you lose self, and all that kind of thing, say what is not true." By supplying their patients with effectual language and meaning based on supernatural causality, divine healers enabled them to ob-jectify their experiences and reenter a larger relational world. It is not surprising that the followers of divine healers saw them as parental figures, given the primordial parental role in the transmission of language and meaning. "Mother Etter" and "Daddy Parham" ordered the lives of the helpless, while Dowie clearly served a paternal role as well, one that increasingly merged human and divine traits.56

55. Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 79-144; Fuller, Alternative Medicine. See Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 125-53, for the "loss of providence" and the growing reliance on the idea of chance to explain human affairs in the postbellum era.

56. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Dowie, "Story of the Leper," 18. Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale

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Once patients externalized their illnesses, they required a means to overcome them. Divine healing provided empowerment to those who had been helpless. They no longer had to accept their diseases as an unavoidable part of living in a fallen natural order. Rather, they could step forth in faith and grasp God's standing offer of perfect health. Though divine healers stressed that it was God's power that healed, their ministries made human agency central to the healing experience. God's will in the matter was fixed; human will activated the experi-ence and sustained it thereafter. This gave enormous power and responsibility to individuals in the matter of their health. The harsh side of this teachingthat the sick were to blame for their state, whether through sins of commission or the sin of unbeliefafflicted many and certainly compounded their sufferings, including Dowie at the end of his life. But others, like Ora Harris, became "every whit whole." Even those not cured of their physical infirmities often found a measure of restoration through the meaning-making and empow-ering functions of divine healing.57

Divine healing also functioned to "make disciples" through its capacity to attract, convert, initiate and retain believers to the full gospel of the healers. Woodworth-Etter saw healing as the best draw-ing card for the gospel: "If ministers could cast out devils today in the name of Jesus, and lay hands on the sick and have them restored to health, they would not preach to empty benches, nor mourn over the dearth of revivals. On the contrary, every minister who could do that would have crowded houses and a perpetual revival." Dowie agreed: "When the gospel of Divine Healing comes back to the church in all its glory and its power, multitudes will press into the temple of the church of G o d . . . and they are doing it even now." Contemporary accounts suggest that many participants at healing revivals came because of their sensationalism. Whether to worship or mock, to satisfy curiosity or be entertained, people came in droves.58

University Press, 1996), 175-77, also draws upon Scarry's insights to interpret the healings of twentieth-century American Catholic women who prayed to St. Jude. Feick, comp., Life and Testimony, 67, 128, 129; Parham, Life of Parham, dedication page. Of course, other religious leaders, including some who did not practice healing, received affectionate parental titles. They also may have given life-altering language and meaning to their followers in the manner suggested, though not necessarily through healing.

57. For the centrali

redeemed bodies

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